Overheard

Politico carried this tasty morsel:

SEN. MARK WARNER (D-Va.) hosted a dinner Friday night for more than 100 guests at his house on Martha’s Vineyard as part of the DSCC’S annual Majority Trust retreat.

OVERHEARD: Warner, the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, joking to the crowd: “If you get me one more glass of wine, I’ll tell you stuff only Bob Mueller and I know. If you think you’ve seen wild stuff so far, buckle up. It’s going to be a wild couple of months.”

Be Afraid

...because if you're not afraid, you might start acting like you're free.

From NYT OpEd:

Today's Lesson

Flag Etiquette - Appropriate Displays.

Example 1 - Signaling Distress:

Today's Tweet

Irony. Subtlety. Comeuppance. Hypocrisy. Nothing sinks in - these people are impervious to everything that governs the normal functioning of a decent civil society. This is The Banality of Evil.

Go back and tell them you're seeking asylum there. By law they have to let you in, and only a depraved monster devoid of morals would defend turning you away. https://t.co/I7a8j0q8pv

— John Fugelsang (@JohnFugelsang) June 23, 2018

Everybody's Favorite

It's Not Porn

The Cost Of The Benefit

Tim Wise at NCORE 2018:

Some notes and highlights:

When you raise the expectations of marginalized people, and you don't deliver, you can expect an explosion.

If you take people who have always had high expectations, and you don't deliver what they're absolutely sure they're entitled to - the explosion can look a lot like Cult45.

Wanna look at the rather frightening mortality trend among Non-College-Educated Working Class White People?

The 3 most often cited causes of 500,000 excess premature deaths in that cohort over a period of 14 years (1999-2013) were Opioids, Suicide, and Alcohol-Related Liver Disease.

We now have some new terminology - Deaths of Despair.

What's driving that trend is not the convenient and intellectually lazy concept of Economic Anxiety.

The hate mail - 😂

The pain is real, but we have to insist on a diagnosis that's not bullshit.

No Good Video

In the furor over Melania's jacket and the naked political opportunism of a White House desperate to stop stepping on its own dick with a track shoe, we lost sight of the fact that Melania was supposed to visit the McAllen Border Patrol Station too.

Instead, we got some nice "optics" from a place called Upbring (part of Lutheran Social Services Inc) - a "non-profit" facility aimed at care for child abuse survivors (now there's an interesting little Freudian twist).

Anyway:

I'm not beating up on the Lutherans, btw, although I'll say again that I purely hate the idea of handing any tax dollars to any religious organization for any reason, but that's another rant.

The point is that Melania didn't visit the McAllen Border Patrol Station, where we've cloistered some goodly number of kids in a makeshift prison camp. That part of the mission was scrubbed. Because - well, it kinda got to rainin'...

They already had their nice pictures of a place they told us held some immigrant kids. So they either had to bar cameras at the next stop because comparing the two joints would prob'ly make the second one look pretty fuckin' awful, or they could make up some shit to pretend they just couldn't get there, or whatever.

And about those pictures - I didn't see every single one of them, but I didn't see any kids either.

I guess I'm also wondering what might happen to the private donations that Upbring actively solicits, now that they've gotten million of dollars worth of free publicity.

It reminds me of the practice of the English sovereign granting special favors to a particular dressmaker or whiskey distiller.  Merit-Based Free-Market Capitalism my dyin' ass. 

Whoa Momma

Trevor Stone Irvin

"Crosses the line"?

"Over the top"?

"We have to be better than this"?

Absolutely. Great care must be taken. Because we need to work hard at not becoming what we're fighting.

Just be aware - Daddy State morgues get filled with the corpses of decent high-minded people who fight the wrong battle.

Today's How-To

A political ad from MJ Hegar, running for US Rep in TX-31:

This is how ya do it, guys. Distinguished Flying Cross - with Valor.

A Podcast

Bob Cesca - every Tuesday and Thursday.

"Every time Trump delivers one of his coke-rants, an angel gets the clap."

Today's Tweet

When the approach to political debate became "say whatever makes a librul mad", it was a relatively short step to reach "do whatever causes people to suffer".

Think about it: This president built tent cities in order to separate, cage and jail immigrant children faster than aid was provided to American citizens in Puerto Rico.

Tell the @GOP to put country before party and #ImpeachTrump here - https://t.co/MqMFGyXc5t pic.twitter.com/cZ7evivUMc

— Democratic Coalition (@TheDemCoalition) June 22, 2018

Just A Thought

A coupla days ago, UN Ambassador Nikki Haley announced we'd be withdrawing from the UN Human Rights Council, saying too many of the countries involved in it are asshole regimes that don't really give a fuck about human rights.

Then we got word about the Kids-Held-Hostage mess at almost exactly the same time.

Now, there's plenty of reason to believe it's just another episode of Cult45 stepping on their own dicks, but that could be assigning too high a probability that it's the kind of coincidence that is pretty goddamned rare in politics.

Daddy State Awareness Rule #1:

Every accusation is a confession

Just for the fuck of it, let's throw in the simple fact that 45* never mentioned anything about NoKo's abysmal record on Human Rights when he was giving Kim that long luxurious tongue bath.

And we should prob'ly try to remember a little something about the Muslim Bans too.

There is no bottom. The Daddy State will always find a way to go lower.

It'll be interesting to see what happens with Stephen Miller now. With Bannon gone, Miller could be 45*'s only really solid connection to the hardcore MAGA-rubes that comprise "the base".

Oy

Poe's Law reigns supreme.

Even after I confirmed it at Time's website, I felt compelled to check it - a lot.

The Wheels Of Justice

...go 'round and 'round - pretty fucking slowly sometimes.

Charlottesville Aug 12 2017

ABC News:

The U.S. Marine who marched with neo-Nazis in last summer's "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, has been found guilty in a summary court-martial after he reportedly bragged online about participating in the violence that day.

Lance Cpl. Vasillios Pistolis was convicted Monday of failing to obey an order or regulation and making a false official statement under Articles 92 and 107 in the Uniform Code of Military Justice, according to the 2nd Marine Logistics Group.

BTW - 

Freikorps (pronounced [ˈfʀaɪ̯ˌkoːɐ̯], "Free Corps")

In the aftermath of World War I and during the German Revolution of 1918–19, Freikorps consisting largely of World War I veterans were raised as right-wing paramilitary militias, ostensibly to fight on behalf of the government against the Soviet-backed German Communists attempting to overthrow the Weimar Republic. However, the Freikorps also despised the Republic and were involved in assassinations of its supporters. The Freikorps were widely seen as a precursor to Nazism, and many of their volunteers ended up joining the Nazi militia, the Sturmabteilung (SA).

Today's Tweet

Here's a very thinly-veiled version of The 14 Words:

#ICYMI Check out the segment from tonight about the changing demographics in America pic.twitter.com/eM1VJkN8OG

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) March 20, 2018

Can you say "Ethnic Cleansing"? Slobodan Carlson wants you to be his friend.